To the Lighthouse

After Woolf published her breakthrough novel Mrs. Dalloway, she raised the stakes and broadened her focus. To the Lighthouse is a stately dance of time, hope and art, as performed by the Ramsay family and their immediate friends as they vacation at a house in the Hebrides. Mrs. Ramsay is a housewife and hostess; her husband is a cold, analytical philosopher; drawn in their wake are, among others, a struggling young painter named Lily Briscoe and their little son James, whose dearest wish is to take a boat ride to a nearby lighthouse. The novel begins as a poignant portrait of family dynamics, but Woolf sets the second half of the book a decade after the first, and that allows her to turn To the Lighthouse into a study of the damage that time and history inflict on the Ramsays’ hopes and dreams, and a celebration of what endures.